Tag: children

Article: Assembling the Global Baby

Assembling the Global Baby
By Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang | The Wall Street Journal | Dec. 10, 2010

This article provides a global overview on laws related to international commercial surrogacy, highlighting the transnational mobility of the practice as regulation around it changes. It might require a subscription or free sign up to The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

the wallstreet journal logoIn a hospital room on the Greek island of Crete with views of a sapphire sea lapping at ancient fortress walls, a Bulgarian woman plans to deliver a baby whose biological mother is an anonymous European egg donor, whose father is Italian, and whose birth is being orchestrated from Los Angeles.

She won’t be keeping the child. The parents-to-be—an infertile Italian woman and her husband (who provided the sperm)—will take custody of the baby this summer, on the day of birth. […]

The man bringing together this disparate group is Rudy Rupak, chief executive of PlanetHospital.com LLC, a California company that searches the globe to find the components for its business line. The business, in this case, is creating babies.

Read the full article >

Initiative: Stop Surrogacy Now

Stop Surrogacy Now
Global | 2015

Stop Surrogacy Now is a global effort to oppose the “exploitation of women and the human trafficking of children through surrogacy.” According to the website, the group includes more than 100 individuals and 16 organizations from 18 countries, who believe all forms of surrogacy should be stopped because it is an abuse of women’s and children’s human rights.

In an article published on Public Discourse, co-founder Kathleen Sloan, describes the genesis of Stop Surrogacy Now, from 2011, when she and co-founder Jennfier Lahl first met at a screening of the documentary Eggsploitation, to the initiative’s current reach and status as a network that has, says Sloan, brought together people who might otherwise be “at each other’s throats.”

Here is an excerpt:

What sets this campaign apart is that Stop Surrogacy Now (SSN) unites organizations and individuals with opposing positions on many other issues—including the emotionally explosive issue of abortion. In the United States especially, no other issue ignites such passionate responses and produces such vitriolic debate. It has even led to violence, including eight murders and over forty clinic bombings. As time goes on, the contentiousness of the issue only seems to increase rather than dissipate. It is therefore extraordinary that so many people who stand on opposite sides of this issue have come together to stop the surrogacy juggernaut.

This campaign also brings together the fervently religious and the entirely non-religious, those who advocate LGBTQ rights and those who oppose same-sex marriage, feminists and non-feminists, the radical right and the radical left along with those in between, neoliberal capitalists and socialists, death-with-dignity supporters and those who consider it to be a form of euthanasia.

Visit Stop Surrogacy Now, read the full article, and follow the initiative’s outreach with The Hague on the human rights issues posed by international commercial surrogacy.

Article: Human Factory Farming and the Campaign to Outlaw Surrogacy

Human Factory Farming and the Campaign to Outlaw Surrogacy
by Mirah Riben | Dissident Voice | May 30, 2015

Here’s an excerpt:

The despair of wanting a child you are unable to produce naturally has led to a multi-billion dollar Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART) industry offering a plethora of reproductive choices resulting in tens of thousands of births a year in the U.S. It has also led to controversy and a campaign to ban it.

Michele Goodwin, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, holds the Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California, Irvine with appointments at the School of Law, School of Public Health, and Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies:

These technologies provide a stunning candy store of options: a spectrum so vast in array, scope, and breadth as to make heads spin: in vitro fertilization, ova selling, cryopreservation of ova, womb renting [surrogacy], pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo transfer, assisted hatching, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, and more.

Producing children with the assistance of anonymous third parties, while increasingly popular and accepted for anyone who can afford it, remains controversial. Despite compassion for the unmet longing to be a parent, there is no right to a child for anyone — heterosexual, homosexual, or singles by choice.

Read the full article >

Article: Nigeria’s Baby Farmers

Nigeria’s Baby Farmers
By Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Rosemary Nwaebuni | Al Jazeera | Dec. 3, 2015

This episode of “Africa Investigates” explores a three-fold problem: pregnant women voluntarily or being forced to give up their children for adoption; young girls confined and forced to produce children that are sold to childless couples trying to avoid the stigma of infertility and adoption in Nigeria; and the role of “miracle” doctors in the country’s rapidly growing demand for children and “baby farms.”

While it does not discuss surrogacy, the implications of what it does talk about, on international adoption and commercial surrogacy, is clear and cautionary.

Read the full article >

Book: Discounted Life – The Price of Global Surrogacy in India

Discounted Life – The Price of Global Surrogacy in India
By Sharmila Rudrappa | NYU Press | December 2015

Sharmila Rudrappa is a distinguished scholar in the field and her book, Discounted Life, is the winner, American Sociological Association Asia and Asian America Section Best Book on Asia/Transnational Asia.

From the publisher’s website:

Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. Is surrogacy solely a labor contract for which the surrogate mother receives wages, or do its meanings and import exceed the confines of the market? Rudrappa argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet her interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. Rudrappa explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development.
A detailed and moving study, Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore’s surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions.